16. Major Pivot- DIY

The DIY Process

You may have noticed that DIY terrariums have appeared a lot in my previous posts. In the last month of ET9135, during and after the National Day giveaway, pretty much all our efforts are spent on developing this DIY line of products. Here I would like to go into more detail about how we are doing it.

Firstly, we chose 4 of our most popular terrariums by the number of likes each of them got on our social media and by how fast they were sold out. These designs were: Beach House, Safari, Magic Owl, and Lake. More information can be found on our Instagram.

Next, we decided on the quantity to sell: for our first batch we would aim to sell 5 per design. This is also as a test to see which of the 4 designs work better than the rest. In the future we may keep the better selling ones and lose the others. On the other hand, we would introduce new designs into the DIY line, so as to keep our products fresh.

Once the quantity is settled, we made a trip to source for the raw materials. This is also the last trip before I leave for my exchange, and also the last one for the duration of ET9135. For the jars and figurines, we spent a total of over $300, the most we have spent in one trip, so this is quite a big risk we are taking.

The other important aspect of the DIY line is a series of videos we are shooting. These videos are step by step guides on how to actually build the terrariums. For each terrarium, we would shoot a video tutorial. As I will be leaving for exchange, I could only participate in shooting 2 out of 4 of the videos, where I helped in making the terrariums in front of the camera.

Fortunately, my job in the team was mainly design and sourcing, and both were settled before my leaving; The designs were already chosen, while we got enough raw materials on our last sourcing trip to make the first batch of the DIY terrariums. The editing of the videos were mainly done by Aaron and Sindy, as they are better at it. These videos are scheduled to be released early September if all goes well.

A screenshot of our videos

Sample of DIY kit

Why DIY?

The idea of DIY has been revolving around us since the beginning of the business. However, we felt that launching DIY at the very start is just not a good idea. There are 2 reasons for this.

1. Our terrarium building skills at the start were not mature. Without confidence in our own designs, it would be a huge and unreasonable risk to take in the early stages, especially since as mentioned before, the DIY sourcing is very costly. Only by going through many prototyping and terrarium building sessions have the aesthetics of our terrariums improved enough for us to have confidence in doing DIY.

2. We need a certain size of social media presence/ reputation/ consumer base before launching DIY. This is just my opinion, but we can see it this way. Consumers are more likely to buy finished terrariums because they can see the final design, and judge whether they like it or not. For DIY however, all they get is a bunch of figurines, some sand, moss and a glass jar. Even with the videos, there is no guarantee that the end product will not come out as a disaster when they make it. As a fresh start up, we don't have the credibility for them to trust us in the quality of the materials.

Therefore, we chose this time to launch our DIY, both because our designs are mature enough, and our reputation is adequate. By focussing on improving our designs and posting all of our terrariums on social media, we have established ourselves to be able to deliver products of a high standard, and our DIY products will surely be of equally high quality.

There are also 2 main advantages that DIY has over the conventional terrariums. The first one is that DIY can be seen as more meaningful to build as gifts. The second one is regarding cost, where we pretty much save all the manpower in building the terrariums, and thus can pass on significant cost savings to the consumers. Moreover, we could use courier services now, where we could not previously due to how easy a finished terrarium gets out of shape.

At any rate, DIY is probably the next big phase for our company, as an effort to improve our current sales.

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